Moray Allan and Didier Raboud gave
some
updates on the upcoming DebConf13 to be held at
Le Camp in Vaumarcus,
Switzerland.
In the blogpost, they confirmed that the conference will take place from
11 to 18 August. With regard to the DebCamp, during which usually the
various Debian teams meet to work on specific issues and projects,
the authors explained that it will probably be held the same week as the
conference: For budget reasons, current plans are to merge the two weeks’ activities
into an 8 day period. If you think that’s a pity, it’s not too late to
change it — just join the fundraising team and start working
quickly!.
Registration will probably open around the start of March.

In related news, the DebConf team sent
a call for bids for DebConf14. If you are interested in putting forward a bid for DebConf14,
send a message to their mailing
list. You are also invited to think about possible venues for DebConf15.
People interested in helping with the organisation of DebConf
are welcome to join the team, and find out how they can help by contacting them on their
mailing list or on the
#debconf-team channel on irc.debian.org.

Johannes Schauer wrote a detailed report of the status
of his Port bootstrap build-ordering tool, which was started as
a Debian GSoC project last year and aims to solve cyclic build
dependencies, making it possible to automate the bootstrapping of Debian on new
architectures.
Since November 2012 the project has reached some important milestones such as
providing a less "monolithic" toolset, a new dependency graph
definition, two new ways to break dependency cycles, and an adjustment of
the algorithm to allow a more precise final build order.

Neil McGovern sent some
bits from the Release team where he reported about the current status
of the freeze. Neil also asked for volunteers to help with the Release
Notes, and particularly for someone with kFreeBSD experience to create
the Release Notes for this port.

Do you want to organise a Debian booth or a Debian install party? Are you aware of other upcoming Debian-related events? Have you delivered a Debian talk that you want to link on our talks page? Send an email to the Debian Events Team.

Four applicants have been accepted as Debian Developers, two applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers and five people have started to maintain packages since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Anton Gladky, Andreas Beckmann, Brian Thomason, Laszlo Kajan, Jean-Michel Vourgère, Richard Hartmann, Vincent W. Chen, Willem van den Akker, James Bennet, Casper Gielen and Stein Magnus Jodal into our project!

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database, the upcoming release, Debian Wheezy, is currently affected by 224 Release-Critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 92 Release-Critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list (and the separate backports list, and stable updates list) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.